[Footnote 3: It is understood that this statement is made in a
subjective rather than a purely physical sense. See theCentury
DictionaryunderSound.]
[Footnote 4: Il y a donc, dans l’art des sons, quelque chose
qui traverse l’oreille comme un portique, la raison comme un
vestibule et qui va plus loin.
HARMONIE ET MELODIE, CHAPTER II.]
Combarieu, the French aesthetician, defines music as “the art
of thinking in tones."[5] There is food for thought in this state-
ment, but it seems to leave out one very important factor—
namely, the emotional. Every great musical composition reveals
a carefully planned and perfect balance between the emotional
and intellectual elements. And yet the basic impulse for the
creation of music is an emotional one; and, of all the arts, mu-
sic makes the most direct appeal to the emotions and to those
shadowy, but real portions of our being called the imagination
and the soul. Emotion is as indispensable to music as love to
religion. Just as there can be no really great art without pas-
sion, so we can not imagine music without all the emotions of
mankind: their loves, joys, sorrows, hatreds, ideals and subtle
fancies. Music, in fact, is a presentation of emotional experience,
fashioned and controlled by an overruling intellectual power.
[Footnote 5:La musique, ses lois, son evolution, by Jules Com-
barieu.]
We can now foresee, though at first dimly, what is to be our line
of approach to this mystery. One of the peculiar characteristics
of music is that it is both the most natural and least artificial of
the arts, and as well the most complicated and subtle. On the
one hand it is the most natural and direct, because the materials
of which it is constituted—that is, sound and rhythm—make an
instinctive appeal to every normally equipped human being.[6]
Every one likes to listen to beautiful sounds merely for their sen-
suous effect, just as everyone likes to look at the blue sky, the
green grass and the changing hues of a sunset; so the rhythm of
music, akin to the human heart-beat and to the ceaseless change
and motion, which is the basic fact in all life, appeals at once to
our own physical vitality. This fact may be observed at a sym-
phony concert where so many people are wagging their heads,
beating time with their hands or even tapping on the floor with
their feet; a habit which shows a rudimentary love of music but